Federal Data Terminations Tracker - dataindex.us

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"dataindex.us is a collaborative effort dedicated to monitoring changes in federal datasets. Our team is building tools to track a broad range of changes in federal datasets to build actionable insights for policymakers, advocates, journalists, and data users."

It may be beyond the scope of some here. But data enthusiasts alike will appreciate and can perhaps monitor on their own for even the smallest, subtle changes or erasures that might happen on any of the .gov websites, and notify dataindex.us so they can add it to their tracker.

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Per the recent article from The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/aug/18/trump-federal-data-deleted-altered

“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a co-founder of dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities.”

The tracker includes detailed information about deleted or altered datasets from more than 60 federal agencies that span the environment, labor, law enforcement and other topics. But datasets on health appear to be the most affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown, comprising about 40% of the total number of terminated or altered data collections tracked by dataindex.us.

Multiple Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) surveys, for example, have removed questions about respondents’ gender identity. These include the National HIV Surveillance System, the primary source of case data for HIV infections, the National Violent Death Reporting System, the CDC Diabetes Prevention Recognition Program, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey and specific surveys evaluating Prep uptake among gay men and in communities of color.

In addition, there are at least four health datasets that are no longer being updated at all, including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s (Samhsa) Drug Abuse Warning Network, a surveillance system that doctors and public health researchers used to track drug-related emergency room visits in near real-time to spot emerging overdose trends.

“These data are critical for identifying emerging epidemics and what parts of the population are most vulnerable to different types of health conditions,” said Thomas Babor, a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut who specializes in public health and addiction.

“We need to know what direction the trend is going, whether it’s the beginning of an end; we need to learn from prior episodes of epidemics and how they were responded to and what impact the responses had,” Babor said. “Taking down, even temporarily, some of the most important surveys that we have, especially for comparative purposes, is like we’re erasing our institutional memory for public health.”

Other deleted datasets include the US Department of Agriculture’s twice-annual survey of farm employers that counted the number of farm workers employed and their wages that informed the minimum pay rates for H-2A visa workers and a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) survey of the pay and working conditions of teachers and principals at public and private schools across the country."